After reading a bit more I realized that this won't work for binary (XLS) files but only for Open XML (.xlsx) files. Wonder if it is at all possible to read data from XLS files without Excel application itself. I've seen some ADODB examples but can't figure out if I can get values in of single says with this method..

Ok, as usually it happens - the moment I posted the previous message I made it work. Had to change the code (changed "Jet" to "ACE" and moved the single quote after HDR=Yes' ). Something like this for my purpose would fit perfect - extract all cell values which are negative in a given worksheet in a given range:

Ok, to finalize the topic completely: When I uninstalled Office from the machine (because the idea is not to have MS Office installed on a server) my code above stopped working. So I dug a bit more and it turns out the original code that Arend_ provided works just with a small tweak - it looks like HDR is not supported for Office 97-2003 files, so I just removed it and the proper code to read such files from KIX should look like this: